Very intelligent host and guest. Amazing what we can learn with such old human remains. I wonder if burial in shackles is a type of curse (like buried in shackles will make you a slave in the afterlife).
That is a very interesting thought. Better hope you don't get buried by your enemies in a culture that believes that how the body is treated is vital for the afterlife!
I am not sure whether this is a possible theory but I know at one time superstitious people were worried about the walking dead and vampires, and several tools were used to combat this . One way was the classic metal stake through the breast and another was decapitation and I wonder were metal shackles used.
In some traditions, it was to prevent the dead from 'walking' amongst the living as malevolent spirits. Along the vein of the Transylvanian vampire tradition in the middle ages where various methods to keep the body and soul together in the earth. Rocks or stakes on the chest etc.
I would guess that the only reason to bury a shackled person is that they were still alive and resisting, ehh? Just think bit. Courtesy of Half Vast Flying
@@jackvoss5841 or they died, and were rotting, which leads to speculation of what happened to the prison keepers. They were buried, which is a custom of preserving the body for the afterlife, someone cared about not spreading disease, they didnt cremate her which is how some cultures deal with burials and that someone wasnt interested in preserving human bondage instruments. She may of been a prison keeper as well, buried alive as you suggested. They recently dug up graves elsewhere, i think it was pompei, with chains still on as well. Sad stuff.
I adore this woman! She is so intelligent and so passionate. You can tell she loves what she does! She is loving the dream in my opinion. I too absolutely love history and just go nuts talking and reading and learning about it!
Determination of 'ancestry' from cranial measurements (Fordisc) has been widely critised. Especially with regard to partial Crania. Eg: "A 2009 study found that FORDISC 3.0 "is only likely to be useful when an unidentified specimen is more or less complete and belongs to one of the populations represented in its reference samples", and even in such "favorable circumstances it can be expected to classify no more than 1 per cent of specimens with confidence."
Why would a slave be buried with usable shackles? Wouldn't it make more sense to shackle, or at least tie up, the body of an executed criminal or evil person, to prevent their spirit from 'walking' with evil intent?
Year 3-400 AD... that at the beginning of the invasion of the Danish Anglians (the people from Jutland) and Saxons (From southern Jutland and northern present-day Germany). Why not say that? All this Roman this or that.... you were conquered from year 300 to 600 by the Danish Anglians who gave you your name and your language.
It was a monumental tragedy that the 1st world highly civilised country of Britain, built up by Rome for over nearly 400 years was invaded and destroyed in an instant by barbaric mud hut building illiterate savages. This genetic scum had never built a city or a town and had any need for books, science or higher learning. Subsistence farming and scribbling in runes was the pinnacle of their great Germanic civilisation.These 'Vandals' were responsible for plunging all of civilised Europe into the dark ages for a thousand years.
It's politics. The EU in some ways, is modelled on the old Roman empire. Vikings, Saxons etc are seen as savages. Whilst the Romans are seen as more cultured and refined savages
OMG reading transcript of my grandmother's diary talking about taking turns with her husband to pull their rotting teeth. I'm sure they used opiates or something prior to it, but she doesn't mention it.
@@michaelstearnesstearnes1498 murdering the ancient druids of the Cymru Briton's, ensuring that millennia of ancient knowledge was lost forever. Pre Roman coins and metalworking furnaces were recently discovered in London, prompting the usual headline that the story needs to be rewritten. The Romano centric default narrative of the establishment academic echo chamber persists, despite pre Roman roads and lots of other sites that are declared Roman before a spade has hit the ground.
Yes, paranoid right-wingers constantly policing the language have made it absolutely impossible even for scientists for to just acknowledge basic facts like this person has teeth that tell us they definitely had African ancestry. The sort of fact that you could a couple if decades ago just deliver factually. Instead she has to spend ages fannying about explaining to retard viewers that the Mediterranean shores arew actually not that far apart, and that having African rather than European teeth doesn’t actually tell us anything about their place of birth, their citizenship, how recent their connection with Africa is, or how they were perceived when they were alive. It’s the sort of FACT that, when you are permitted to observe it, leads to other work - say, like analysing the strontium and whatever in their enamel to try to find out where they did grow up. Hard as it is for right whingers to grasp, when a scientist says “a diverse population” they just mean exactly that. Nothing more or less than that. Rather than, say, an inbred population. Or a population consisting only of people of Italian and people of British ancestry.
Very interesting but I find some of your conclusions far fetched. Teeth worn that extensively are not painful as it is a gradual process. Why were the shackles necessarily on slaves - why not criminals/prisoners. Reconstruction of the face from just a portion of lower and upper jaws to define their ethnicities is a stretch, particularly the amounts I see in the photos. Yes, I believe the DNA results but North African DNA is spread all over the Mediterranean. Paget’s is a genetic disease and should be identifiable from DNA. Mostly well done though.
I believe it would be great if this scientist had a weekly blog by taking a recent discovery and explaining what the remains tell her. I would certainly watch!
@@whoarewe7515 i don't understand your point. Given the current persecution of the British over the Empire and the demand for "apologies and reparations" it is clear that African mercenaries assisted the Romans in the invasion and enslavement of the people of the British Isles. Slavery was not a feature of ancient British culture, it was most certainly a feature of the Roman/African culture that was imposed on the British!
@@nickjung7394 there is no point for as long as people tribes of native counties they have been taking people prisoner raping murdering and all the things you mentioned
The black nationalists in the US continually ignore North Africa as being Africa, and always populated by people of Arab/Levant/European descent, and try to claim the African troops, governors and emporers were black. But of course, they weren't.
Yepe the majority of Africans who lived in Rome and its provinces were North Africans and not black. However, the woke and leftist scholars are obsessed with forcing SSAs into Roman Britain and proving the noncase that Britain and Europe were filled with black Africans. There were black Africans in Rome but they were a small minority. Here's the thing, North Africans are too Caucasiod and not black enough for the taste of the woke scholars. Therefore this scholar was tap dancing talking confusing stuff about the ancestry and origin of the found human remains. You have to take everything these liberal scholars say about DNA or ancestry with a grain of salt.
Lol, have you ever heard of Carthage it's in North Africa? And this person was from Africa before Islam massacred north Africa. He might have looked like any number of humans. Quit it with the colorism.
They may not have been slaves but criminals or people who scared the community. I really wish they would remake these finds WITH their jewelry and things so that we could actually see how they looked in the face and at burial.
Depending on the Roman view of the afterlife in a given period, burying them with shackles might be seen as a way of perpetuating their status (slave or criminal) beyond death. ='[.]'=
The female skeleton shows she may have been an early Saxon that came to Britain in the late 4th/early 5th century A.D. - the first wave of what became the "English" people.
An interesting video. I lived in Chester for a time, it is another Roman City. I noticed on one of my walks that the wall had been repaired in places, by Roman grave stones. At the time I thought it disrespectful to the deceased. Your mention of finding skeletons wearing shackles, can really only lead to one conclusion. Iron was a valuable resource so the iron would have been removed prior to burial, unless the corpse had died of some disease that was contagious, that might have deterred someone from remaining in the company of the corpse for too long, or of touching it. Something like leprosy perhaps, or plague. The slave owner might not have wanted to reuse the shackles and risk spreading the disease to another slave. Slaves cost money after all. If the corpse had been buried alive for some reason, I would have thought the iron shackles would have been replaced by cheaper rope. So disease seems the more obvious answer.
Generally enslaved peoples in the Roman Empire after the middle of the first century, were generationally enslaved, therefore they were born and traded. They had an ascribed status. It is far more likely that someone buried and shackled were something else. Criminals were shackled and thrown on rubbish dumps. Slaves were usually buried i. Slave cemeteries.
My first thought. The value of the reuseable metal being more than the value of a slave. The existence of a shakle is a Statement. "Never leave me again my love/ you slept around too much/you are a political murderer/your innocent virtue will rest unviolated...." my mind is instantly drawn back to the curses of others' scratched on lead and thrown into Minerva's pool at what is now the Roman Baths [in Bath, UK.] Some of those /expensive lead_ scratched curses were ablaze with *real raging vitriol*, even just for stealing a comb! _Fascinating._
In my, very humble, opinion the Roman Empire would not take the trouble to bury slaves in limited grave sites complete with their fetters. Why waste a valuable crafted piece of metal? My view that this was a ritualistic thing. Who knows what it was 16 centuries later but I would think a more likely explanation was to chin him, or her, as they were a nasty piece of work when they were living.
Alice Thompson: You can see it better in Chester. The Roman street level was about twenty feet lower than present day levels. Lots of Roman ruins there and excavations showing how the Romans lived, their central heating etc. Just outside the town is a mass grave where plague victims were buried. Royalist soldiers from the English Civil war, are also buried in the graveyard. Outside the graveyard is a monument to a Protestant Martyr, burned at the stake for his faith. Chester is well worth a visit.
@@jamesnicholson3658 How would they know that? How would they know where someone was born? I'm thinking they mean someone from the negro race and negro race would have been a more accurate way of communicating their meaning.
It could be that the Romans of the time thought the very same thing about their predecessors... and, of course, wondering just when the toilet paper would be showing up.
The Ancient Romans used Sponge.. harvested from the Sea, which they used for " toilet paper",🗞️washed them after every use , ready for the next application.. Ever wondered why the Roman soldiers had sponge mentioned during The Christ's crucifixion ?
@@manfredrichthofen2494 That is interesting. Its never occurred to me to question...why was a sponge on a stick at the crucifixion site? The most logical reasons would be: sponge was used for giving liquid to the people being crucified as a simple act of kindness. Or somebody went to get the sponge on a stick as a final act of contempt and belittlement. I vote for option #2 as most likely. That's incredible to contemplate but the actions fit the motive at that place and time.
So what? All you mountain dwellers so is get burned by the sun. I can sit in it all day and my melanin rich skin won’t betray me. As the earth gets hotter I don’t have to worry, but you do. Good luck with that low birth rate too!
@@floraposteschild4184 It's pseudoscience, even thought so by many when Hitler was practicing it, but I'm willing to change my mind if you can link me to a paper or a credible source that states the race of a person can be determined by their jaw or skull with an acceptable degree of accuracy.
Opioid syrup for toothaches sounds fine to me, especially when dental pain can be some of the worse pain there is. All of this under treatment of pain due to others abusing those types of substances is exactly what lead to this "epidemic" in the 1st place (under treatment lead to oxycontin being over prescribed & doctors not tapering patients as they shoud always do. And abuse & a opioid/opiate epidemic is nothing new & was the reason for the creation of drug scheduling/drug laws). Not to mention there is NOTHING over the counter that helps with pain. Taking a Tic Tac gives the same result as they do, they just taste better if it doesnt go down the first try.
I have read original latin souces after 50 from high school I can still read latin that the romans used poopy syropp to relieve pain but knew it was addictive.
Kristi Skinner: Aspirin, Paracetamol; Ibuprofen; Cocodamol, Codeine. Anything stronger requires a prescription from a doctor. For mild to moderate pain the over-the-counter medicines are fine.
Creating problems for future archaeologists. " 'ere Blacksmith, I lost the key to that there padlock some 25 years ago , just after I bought that slave, so how much to get 'em off without damaging 'em?" "I could do 'em for 30 denarius and that's cutting my own throat" What about just cutting off those there ankles then?"
Imagine how much more we would know if every person had written a bit about their daily lives. Or even if it was a habit to bury the dead with a little gravestone implanted in the body cavity: their name, occupation, and age forever attached to their bones.
When she starts on her "London was very diverse" spiel at the end she completely fails to mention that you can tell where someone grew up from the isotopes locked in the tooth enamel. Rather than dancing about that they were "of African descent" (aren't we all - based on the 'Out of Africa' theory), but their DNA is redolent of modern people from across Europe and North Africa (i.e. not Sub-Saharan Africa), she could have just stated the tooth isotopes say they grew up in X place.
I began to lose trust in her credibility at the "London was very diverse" spiel, she is technically very capable and obviously very knowledgeable on her technical subject matter, but, I began to doubt her ability to unbiasedly put all the pieces into place. I thought using facial bone structure in modern humans to determine race went out the door with the nazis, and she already had dna evidence that the remains were not African or at least not what the common man would call African. Let's not forget there are many hundreds if not tens of thousands of remains from the Roman Period, some of which she also mentioned, but she brought along the remains of this individual to make vague claims of Diversity. Which seemed to be the narrative she, or perhaps the filmmaker's (she did seem embarrassed a bit uncomfortable at this point), wanted to make from the beginning. If London was indeed as diverse as claimed then I would expect some sort of statistical study or evidence to back up the claim; nothing except one individual data point was provided; and that didn't conclusively prove her point.
@@lenabreijer1311 Sticks and stones mate, call me all the names you like, it's not a valid argument, nor does it change the fact she misrepresented the situation. Can't help you if you're too stupid to understand what was discussed or that it goes against your ideology.
If my spine is fused together, I’m riddled with painful swelling and various arthritis, plus my teeth are worn down to the pulp…You’re gd right I’m gunna be sipping on some poppy syrup!!🤣
Brushing your teeth with dog poop?!! Gross! haha I mean horse hair and plain water would be better. Like how hard is it to try cleaning your mouth with water before you decide to eat dog poo........?????
Pull up Alexander next to his tut copy cat here in Portland, and roseburg oregon, and IMAGINE. 29 30 years old a piece modern day back then to NOW. they were LOW INCOME, OL TUT ALEX, BELIEVE IT.
Dr. Redfern just opened a window to an ancient past..of Romans living in London...with such clarity ....invaders who did not end well ...and brushing their teeth with dog poo??? Dr Redfern... you are amazing....love the details....
What does "African" mean? Is it sub-saharan African? Africa is quite diverse and can be a lot of very distinct things, so it's always unfortunate that the vague term "African" is used in British vulgarisation of science. Not to mention it can confuse people with the original roman meaning of African, which is different from the modern meaning and only referred to the indigenous people of the area around modern-day Tunisia/Tripolitania/Eastern Algeria (Asian also had a different meaning). Also, the disease of the second individual (Paget's) as well as the DNA results are not in line with a Sub-Saharan origin. The most likely origin is European or North African to a lesser extent, even though prognatism is uncommon nowadays in these populations, it may have been more common in these ancient roman-era Europeans/Mediterraneans. Anyway, there are indeed recorded instances of "Ethiopians" (Sub-Saharans) in Roman Britain and the Roman world, but they were not very common and most people probably have never met Ethiopians in the Roman Empire, let alone Britain. Even the [in-]famous instance of the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus in his visit to Britain seeing an "Ethiopian" soldier was so unusual and shocking to him that he thought it was a bad omen.
By law people had to be buried outside the city walls. So it was more likely that families didn't want to have a loved one so far away or couldn't afford a proper burial. Although undoubtedly some were foul play! The Romans were a rough lot.
I wonder if most people follow her deliberate use of English ? She is using words like "prone" in their rigorous definitions, and she is doing so to highlight important facts their research has uncovered. Prone meaning face down, this is unusual in human burials, in most cultures at the time. people were buried laying on their side. Laying face down in your grave seemed to have some significance because of its rarity but quite WHAT it signified remains a matter of speculation. So she notes it as an important fact of that burial. And her interview is full of these distinctions, there is a lot more information she is sharing than most people without training will grasp.
This Russian invasion of Ukraine sheds some light on some prone burials, I think. The news reports following body recovery teams (Whether exhumation of ad-hoc burials, atrocity victims in the woods or bodies found in rubble.) What happens now in the extreme circumstances of war would happen in the past to strangers and beggars. When a body is in rigor, it’s often not lying in any neat position; they get rolled into a blanket (or bodybag, or shroud) and then transported, lifted on and off vehicles etc, and handled by different sets of people on the way to their eventual burial. The same goes for people found after decay has begun. By the end of the line, no-one knows or is going to look inside the blanket or bodybag to find out which way up the body is. And rather than lift the body to put it in the grave - which is very difficult in the best if circumstances - they TIP it in. I can imagine this happening in a town context to people discovered murdered in a field, say, or to drowning victims washed up or pulled out of the river after skin slippage, fish nibbling and battered by boats and shore. If you’ve reached the fragrant stage, then once you’re wrapped up, it really isn’t easy to tell what way up you are. And if you are a dead pauper, criminal or stranger carted to the graveyard for the sake of public hygiene, or in a situation like war or plague when the gravediggers are overwhelmed - there may be no-one who cares what way up you are.
@@eh1702 That is a very interesting speculation. It seems very likely, just from the purely human empathy point of view. I wonder how you could go about *scientifically* determining if that was the case in an archaic burial ?.
@@uncletiggermclaren7592 I don’t see that it could be *determined*, but you could perhaps find a balance of probabilities if you examined all prone skeletons and found some statistical trend. I don’t know if it is physically possible, but perhaps from the bones of fingers, toes, eye sockets etc, it could be possible to decide whether decay began in an oxygen rich environment - in the open air - or in water (say with tiny water organisms) or in the soil. If you were able to find a big enough number of stored bones from prone burials that have been well documented, and compare them with normal burials from the same general time & locality, you might be able to see an area where the two sets don’t overlap.
@@MandoHalrissian Bloody no good immigrants - I mean what did the Romans ever do for us? Don't even get me started on the Saxons, Vikings and Normans. There we were one day running around naked with blue paint all over us and then these good for nothing foreigners came and built roads and cities. Bastards.
So north west South Africa where the Berbers are? What is your obsession with Britain being multi cultural since it’s inception is quite astounding. Stop trying to rewrite history it’s getting quite boring. Tell us all about the inventions from sub Saharan Africa if you want to inform us of their rich history good luck.
interesting analysis of how people were buried in Roman London with Dr Rebecca Redfern and ,Dr Simon Elliott. Shackles might indicate either prisoner or slave.
The sound engineer needs to have filtered out the should of the male presenter's audit mouth breathing room when the woman has answering his questions. It's creepy
In cases where the vertebrae are fused you can end up like Richard III (different condition in his case) but you only have pain during the inflammatory phase. You will never look like an Olympic gymnast but you can be functional.
![Tee Grizzley - Blow for Blow (feat. J. Cole) [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/wNLN5xsx5dc/mqdefault.jpg)
Such a lovely enthusiastic lady. Makes history fascinating. She's lovely
If this was the BBC's Horrible Histories all the skeletons would be from sub Saharan Africa.
Just shut up for once! Keep your racism to yourself!
Very astute sir . Bravo 👏🏻👏🏻
🤣🤣🤣
They would've been LGBT somehow as well.
She is a natural teacher. I really loved this video. Thanks for posting it.
Very intelligent host and guest. Amazing what we can learn with such old human remains. I wonder if burial in shackles is a type of curse (like buried in shackles will make you a slave in the afterlife).
That is a very interesting thought. Better hope you don't get buried by your enemies in a culture that believes that how the body is treated is vital for the afterlife!
@@penguinista Like America?
who'd want to bury a perfectly good pair of shackles ?
I am not sure whether this is a possible theory but I know at one time superstitious people were worried about the walking dead and vampires, and several tools were used to combat this . One way was the classic metal stake through the breast and another was decapitation and I wonder were metal shackles used.
@@garypautard1069 you have the same effect now with migrants…except that superstitious tools used to defend people are slogans and flags.
If some people were buried still wearing shackles, I think that suggests that they were considered dangerous people even in their afterlife
In some traditions, it was to prevent the dead from 'walking' amongst the living as malevolent spirits. Along the vein of the Transylvanian vampire tradition in the middle ages where various methods to keep the body and soul together in the earth. Rocks or stakes on the chest etc.
That was my thought too, especially if the shackles are expensive.
Yes. The people that removed the shackles will now be a target of the freed spirits….
I would guess that the only reason to bury a shackled person is that they were still alive and resisting, ehh? Just think bit.
Courtesy of Half Vast Flying
@@jackvoss5841 or they died, and were rotting, which leads to speculation of what happened to the prison keepers. They were buried, which is a custom of preserving the body for the afterlife, someone cared about not spreading disease, they didnt cremate her which is how some cultures deal with burials and that someone wasnt interested in preserving human bondage instruments. She may of been a prison keeper as well, buried alive as you suggested. They recently dug up graves elsewhere, i think it was pompei, with chains still on as well.
Sad stuff.
I adore this woman! She is so intelligent and so passionate. You can tell she loves what she does! She is loving the dream in my opinion. I too absolutely love history and just go nuts talking and reading and learning about it!
Absolutely fascinating,
although I was a bit disappointed Dr. Redfern didn't say anything about her years working with Scooby Doo.
Welma.....hehehehe.
Rut Roh
Determination of 'ancestry' from cranial measurements (Fordisc) has been widely critised. Especially with regard to partial Crania. Eg:
"A 2009 study found that FORDISC 3.0 "is only likely to be useful when an unidentified specimen is more or less complete and belongs to one of the populations represented in its reference samples", and even in such "favorable circumstances it can be expected to classify no more than 1 per cent of specimens with confidence."
🤣🤣🤣🤣
Very true I just watched Simon Webb talk about this
@@accountretired9479 one never knows anything for sure
SHHHHH!! You are ruining their fantasy history
Good thing they had the pelvis!
Another brilliant video
Great video, shame the camera man was eating the microphone the whole time.
I enjoy this program.. thank you.
Dr Rebecca needs her own show!
Why would a slave be buried with usable shackles?
Wouldn't it make more sense to shackle, or at least tie up, the body of an executed criminal or evil person, to prevent their spirit from 'walking' with evil intent?
Really fascinating. Great video.
Interesting. Thanks
Year 3-400 AD... that at the beginning of the invasion of the Danish Anglians (the people from Jutland) and Saxons (From southern Jutland and northern present-day Germany). Why not say that? All this Roman this or that.... you were conquered from year 300 to 600 by the Danish Anglians who gave you your name and your language.
It was a monumental tragedy that the 1st world highly civilised country of Britain, built up by Rome for over nearly 400 years was invaded and destroyed in an instant by barbaric mud hut building illiterate savages. This genetic scum had never built a city or a town and had any need for books, science or higher learning. Subsistence farming and scribbling in runes was the pinnacle of their great Germanic civilisation.These 'Vandals' were responsible for plunging all of civilised Europe into the dark ages for a thousand years.
It's politics. The EU in some ways, is modelled on the old Roman empire. Vikings, Saxons etc are seen as savages. Whilst the Romans are seen as more cultured and refined savages
@@aevans-jl9ym These "barbarians" spoke the language you speak now and had the culture you have now. How would you know? I guess you cant even read.
not sure why they're so surprised that they took opiates for toothache?! have they got any better ideas??!
OMG reading transcript of my grandmother's diary talking about taking turns with her husband to pull their rotting teeth. I'm sure they used opiates or something prior to it, but she doesn't mention it.
What have the romans ever done for us?……:D
Well......They did bring peace.
@@michaelstearnesstearnes1498 murdering the ancient druids of the Cymru Briton's, ensuring that millennia of ancient knowledge was lost forever. Pre Roman coins and metalworking furnaces were recently discovered in London, prompting the usual headline that the story needs to be rewritten. The Romano centric default narrative of the establishment academic echo chamber persists, despite pre Roman roads and lots of other sites that are declared Roman before a spade has hit the ground.
@@andrewwhelan7311 The original post was a joke from Monty Python.
@@andrewwhelan7311 Christ 🤦♂️
Aqueducts? Law and order?
@14:16 "Population affiliation". Hmmm, that's a new one.
Yes, paranoid right-wingers constantly policing the language have made it absolutely impossible even for scientists for to just acknowledge basic facts like this person has teeth that tell us they definitely had African ancestry. The sort of fact that you could a couple if decades ago just deliver factually. Instead she has to spend ages fannying about explaining to retard viewers that the Mediterranean shores arew actually not that far apart, and that having African rather than European teeth doesn’t actually tell us anything about their place of birth, their citizenship, how recent their connection with Africa is, or how they were perceived when they were alive. It’s the sort of FACT that, when you are permitted to observe it, leads to other work - say, like analysing the strontium and whatever in their enamel to try to find out where they did grow up. Hard as it is for right whingers to grasp, when a scientist says “a diverse population” they just mean exactly that. Nothing more or less than that. Rather than, say, an inbred population. Or a population consisting only of people of Italian and people of British ancestry.
Very interesting but I find some of your conclusions far fetched. Teeth worn that extensively are not painful as it is a gradual process. Why were the shackles necessarily on slaves - why not criminals/prisoners. Reconstruction of the face from just a portion of lower and upper jaws to define their ethnicities is a stretch, particularly the amounts I see in the photos. Yes, I believe the DNA results but North African DNA is spread all over the Mediterranean. Paget’s is a genetic disease and should be identifiable from DNA. Mostly well done though.
To gruesome for me. 😟
I believe it would be great if this scientist had a weekly blog by taking a recent discovery and explaining what the remains tell her. I would certainly watch!
she was amazing would love to spend hours talking to her about history, great vid
Right, so you would like to talk about dead people all day?
@@randomvintagefilm273 I know what id like to do with her and it wouldn't be talking about dead people lol
@@ramoncanham9751 aye aye
@@randomvintagefilm273 I hate the living.
@@ramoncanham9751 😊 I Agree with you 💯❗😄
"What did the Romans ever do for us?"......
"Errrrrmmm.... education, sanitation, aqueducts."
What a great film that was......
LOL!
Invasion, rape, pillage, occupation, stealing of resources, enslavement and colonisation!
@@nickjung7394 that was all happening before the Romans.
@@whoarewe7515 i don't understand your point. Given the current persecution of the British over the Empire and the demand for "apologies and reparations" it is clear that African mercenaries assisted the Romans in the invasion and enslavement of the people of the British Isles. Slavery was not a feature of ancient British culture, it was most certainly a feature of the Roman/African culture that was imposed on the British!
@@nickjung7394 there is no point for as long as people tribes of native counties they have been taking people prisoner raping murdering and all the things you mentioned
The person was almost certainly of North African origin, not sub-Saharan.
Yes, most of North Africa in the early 400s had been part of Rome for almost 300 years.
The black nationalists in the US continually ignore North Africa as being Africa, and always populated by people of Arab/Levant/European descent, and try to claim the African troops, governors and emporers were black. But of course, they weren't.
Yepe the majority of Africans who lived in Rome and its provinces were North Africans and not black. However, the woke and leftist scholars are obsessed with forcing SSAs into Roman Britain and proving the noncase that Britain and Europe were filled with black Africans. There were black Africans in Rome but they were a small minority. Here's the thing, North Africans are too Caucasiod and not black enough for the taste of the woke scholars. Therefore this scholar was tap dancing talking confusing stuff about the ancestry and origin of the found human remains. You have to take everything these liberal scholars say about DNA or ancestry with a grain of salt.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Lol, have you ever heard of Carthage it's in North Africa? And this person was from Africa before Islam massacred north Africa. He might have looked like any number of humans. Quit it with the colorism.
I really enjoy this program. The young woman is charming, very well educated and passionate about in her subject
They may not have been slaves but criminals or people who scared the community. I really wish they would remake these finds WITH their jewelry and things so that we could actually see how they looked in the face and at burial.
Depending on the Roman view of the afterlife in a given period, burying them with shackles might be seen as a way of perpetuating their status (slave or criminal) beyond death. ='[.]'=
Would help if old mate wasnt a mouth breather, jesus.
Amazing how you can find out how people lived by their DNA.😜🤧😦😷
How DNA has come so far to help not only detectives; but archeologists to guide us into the lives of are ancestors.
The female skeleton shows she may have been an early Saxon that came to Britain in the late 4th/early 5th century A.D. - the first wave of what became the "English" people.
An interesting video. I lived in Chester for a time, it is another Roman City.
I noticed on one of my walks that the wall had been repaired in places, by Roman grave stones. At the time I thought it disrespectful to the deceased.
Your mention of finding skeletons wearing shackles, can really only lead to one conclusion.
Iron was a valuable resource so the iron would have been removed prior to burial, unless the corpse had died of some disease that was contagious, that might have deterred someone from remaining in the company of the corpse for too long, or of touching it.
Something like leprosy perhaps, or plague.
The slave owner might not have wanted to reuse the shackles and risk spreading the disease to another slave.
Slaves cost money after all.
If the corpse had been buried alive for some reason, I would have thought the iron shackles would have been replaced by cheaper rope.
So disease seems the more obvious answer.
Generally enslaved peoples in the Roman Empire after the middle of the first century, were generationally enslaved, therefore they were born and traded. They had an ascribed status. It is far more likely that someone buried and shackled were something else. Criminals were shackled and thrown on rubbish dumps. Slaves were usually buried i. Slave cemeteries.
Is it just me or was the dude breathing really loudly into his lav the entire time?
My first thought.
The value of the reuseable metal being more than the value of a slave. The existence of a shakle is a Statement.
"Never leave me again my love/ you slept around too much/you are a political murderer/your innocent virtue will rest unviolated...."
my mind is instantly drawn back to the curses of others' scratched on lead and thrown into Minerva's pool at what is now the Roman Baths [in Bath, UK.]
Some of those /expensive lead_ scratched curses were ablaze with *real raging vitriol*, even just for stealing a comb! _Fascinating._
In my, very humble, opinion the Roman Empire would not take the trouble to bury slaves in limited grave sites complete with their fetters. Why waste a valuable crafted piece of metal? My view that this was a ritualistic thing. Who knows what it was 16 centuries later but I would think a more likely explanation was to chin him, or her, as they were a nasty piece of work when they were living.
Just stumbled across this channel, what a treat. If only all hosts and guests could be this friendly.
Rebecca is wonderful - please can we see much more? absolutely fascinated
I absolutely love watching this sort of stuff, I find it totally amazing that people use to walk all those years ago where we walk now!!
Alice Thompson: You can see it better in Chester. The Roman street level was about twenty feet lower than present day levels. Lots of Roman ruins there and excavations showing how the Romans lived, their central heating etc.
Just outside the town is a mass grave where plague victims were buried.
Royalist soldiers from the English Civil war, are also buried in the graveyard.
Outside the graveyard is a monument to a Protestant Martyr, burned at the stake for his faith.
Chester is well worth a visit.
Yeah I will!
Interesting video but guy needs to work on that mouth breathing, got very distracting.
What does 'African' mean? North African as in Berbers or Sub-Sahara? There are many races in Africa.
probably it means the person was born in the African continent somewhere
@@jamesnicholson3658 How would they know that? How would they know where someone was born? I'm thinking they mean someone from the negro race and negro race would have been a more accurate way of communicating their meaning.
I think we should all appreciate not being born in Roman times….no matter how difficult that can be.
One of the things I AM grateful for - toilet paper.
@@hlmoore8042 I repair paper machines.
You're welcome.
It could be that the Romans of the time thought the very same thing about their predecessors... and, of course, wondering just when the toilet paper would be showing up.
The Ancient Romans used Sponge.. harvested from the Sea, which they used for " toilet paper",🗞️washed them after every use , ready for the next application..
Ever wondered why the Roman soldiers had sponge mentioned during The Christ's crucifixion ?
@@manfredrichthofen2494 That is interesting. Its never occurred to me to question...why was a sponge on a stick at the crucifixion site? The most logical reasons would be: sponge was used for giving liquid to the people being crucified as a simple act of kindness. Or somebody went to get the sponge on a stick as a final act of contempt and belittlement. I vote for option #2 as most likely. That's incredible to contemplate but the actions fit the motive at that place and time.
Yeah …African in this context means Northern Africa above the great desert …
So what? All you mountain dwellers so is get burned by the sun. I can sit in it all day and my melanin rich skin won’t betray me. As the earth gets hotter I don’t have to worry, but you do. Good luck with that low birth rate too!
Exactly….
In the context of ‘northern africa above the great desert’, does that make them less african than others?
Also when she says North Africa I believe they were mostly Macedonians and Greeks etc not the Arabs of today
The Arab conquest came later. I believe they were Greek and Phoenicians.
@@josm1206 that’s what I said
@@MrTangolizard you did. But I was simply adding the Phoenicians. Carthage etc was a Phoenician city.
@@josm1206 ok fair enough ,
What makes you think so? Neither country is in Africa.
Great chat but you might want to turn down his lav mic.
As I expected they could tell what sex these skeletons are even after so many hundreds of years.
Very informative video, but it would have been much better if I couldn't hear the man breathing in his mic the whole time 😑🥴
The mouth breathing is painful to listen to
He needs to exercise.
Maybe he has asthma?
He may need his adenoids done. Or he has sinusitis.
What’s so strange about taking opiates for toothache?? We take co-codamal today
Opium has been used in the ancient world for thousands of years, even the Egyptians used it plus the Greeks, Romans middle eastern people. .
'You can tell by the shape of the upper jaw they're of African descent' what complete and utter nonsense.
Care to give us a rundown of your expertise in this field, professor? You've examined these skeletons, of course?
@@floraposteschild4184 It's pseudoscience, even thought so by many when Hitler was practicing it, but I'm willing to change my mind if you can link me to a paper or a credible source that states the race of a person can be determined by their jaw or skull with an acceptable degree of accuracy.
@DadisDad often times bones will contain element buildup from the water and food sources as well giving a good indicator
Opioid syrup for toothaches sounds fine to me, especially when dental pain can be some of the worse pain there is. All of this under treatment of pain due to others abusing those types of substances is exactly what lead to this "epidemic" in the 1st place (under treatment lead to oxycontin being over prescribed & doctors not tapering patients as they shoud always do. And abuse & a opioid/opiate epidemic is nothing new & was the reason for the creation of drug scheduling/drug laws). Not to mention there is NOTHING over the counter that helps with pain. Taking a Tic Tac gives the same result as they do, they just taste better if it doesnt go down the first try.
I have read original latin souces after 50 from high school I can still read latin that the romans used poopy syropp to relieve pain but knew it was addictive.
Kristi Skinner: Aspirin, Paracetamol; Ibuprofen; Cocodamol, Codeine. Anything stronger requires a prescription from a doctor.
For mild to moderate pain the over-the-counter medicines are fine.
I’m sure one of my old school teachers brushed their teeth with dog poo. Always wondered how they got their breath to smell like that?
Creating problems for future archaeologists.
" 'ere Blacksmith, I lost the key to that there padlock some 25 years ago , just after I bought that slave, so how much to get 'em off without damaging 'em?"
"I could do 'em for 30 denarius and that's cutting my own throat"
What about just cutting off those there ankles then?"
I've been prescribed codeine for a tooth abscess, so we still take opiates for tooth pain now- as well as for other infections.
True
Imagine how much more we would know if every person had written a bit about their daily lives. Or even if it was a habit to bury the dead with a little gravestone implanted in the body cavity: their name, occupation, and age forever attached to their bones.
When she starts on her "London was very diverse" spiel at the end she completely fails to mention that you can tell where someone grew up from the isotopes locked in the tooth enamel.
Rather than dancing about that they were "of African descent" (aren't we all - based on the 'Out of Africa' theory), but their DNA is redolent of modern people from across Europe and North Africa (i.e. not Sub-Saharan Africa), she could have just stated the tooth isotopes say they grew up in X place.
Yup, strontium.
They might be second generation so Britain is where they grew up. And still have complete African DNA .
I began to lose trust in her credibility at the "London was very diverse" spiel, she is technically very capable and obviously very knowledgeable on her technical subject matter, but, I began to doubt her ability to unbiasedly put all the pieces into place. I thought using facial bone structure in modern humans to determine race went out the door with the nazis, and she already had dna evidence that the remains were not African or at least not what the common man would call African.
Let's not forget there are many hundreds if not tens of thousands of remains from the Roman Period, some of which she also mentioned, but she brought along the remains of this individual to make vague claims of Diversity. Which seemed to be the narrative she, or perhaps the filmmaker's (she did seem embarrassed a bit uncomfortable at this point), wanted to make from the beginning. If London was indeed as diverse as claimed then I would expect some sort of statistical study or evidence to back up the claim; nothing except one individual data point was provided; and that didn't conclusively prove her point.
@@damo5701 your bigotry does not invalidate the known facts, nor her expertise.
@@lenabreijer1311 Sticks and stones mate, call me all the names you like, it's not a valid argument, nor does it change the fact she misrepresented the situation. Can't help you if you're too stupid to understand what was discussed or that it goes against your ideology.
It is kind of creepy to be walking in a place like London, knowing how many dead people are right under your feet.
And walking amongst you
This is not unique. The same things can be said for any metropolis in the world.
Can he breathe any harder?
If my spine is fused together, I’m riddled with painful swelling and various arthritis, plus my teeth are worn down to the pulp…You’re gd right I’m gunna be sipping on some poppy syrup!!🤣
The skeletons would say, "on the whole, I'd rather be in kensington".
Love the passion for her work and the history!! Wonderful presentation thank you.💚
i take what she says with a grain of salt - she is only speculating on many things she says
Great video! His breathing is very loud though
Brushing your teeth with dog poop?!! Gross! haha I mean horse hair and plain water would be better. Like how hard is it to try cleaning your mouth with water before you decide to eat dog poo........?????
Pull up Alexander next to his tut copy cat here in Portland, and roseburg oregon, and IMAGINE. 29 30 years old a piece modern day back then to NOW. they were LOW INCOME, OL TUT ALEX, BELIEVE IT.
So much information from just a few old bones and teeth. Good work.
When this Person was buried upside down n a well, how did it happen that nobody noticed? Seems like it would have changed the water’s taste a bit.
Rebecca is gorgeous. I could listen to her voice all day.
Dr. Redfern just opened a window to an ancient past..of Romans living in London...with such clarity ....invaders who did not end well ...and brushing their teeth with dog poo??? Dr Redfern... you are amazing....love the details....
Constructive criticism: the camera-person is breathing through his mouth in bursts and this is "in our ear", so to speak.
I read this wrong. I saw "The Skeletons of the Two Ronnies" for some bizarre reason. I need glasses.
What does "African" mean? Is it sub-saharan African? Africa is quite diverse and can be a lot of very distinct things, so it's always unfortunate that the vague term "African" is used in British vulgarisation of science. Not to mention it can confuse people with the original roman meaning of African, which is different from the modern meaning and only referred to the indigenous people of the area around modern-day Tunisia/Tripolitania/Eastern Algeria (Asian also had a different meaning). Also, the disease of the second individual (Paget's) as well as the DNA results are not in line with a Sub-Saharan origin. The most likely origin is European or North African to a lesser extent, even though prognatism is uncommon nowadays in these populations, it may have been more common in these ancient roman-era Europeans/Mediterraneans.
Anyway, there are indeed recorded instances of "Ethiopians" (Sub-Saharans) in Roman Britain and the Roman world, but they were not very common and most people probably have never met Ethiopians in the Roman Empire, let alone Britain. Even the [in-]famous instance of the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus in his visit to Britain seeing an "Ethiopian" soldier was so unusual and shocking to him that he thought it was a bad omen.
My subjective opinion would be north Africa. Which is still Africa ;].
'You can't tell by the shape of the upper jaw they're of African descent' it's complete and utter nonsense.
It would be so fascinating to spend some time talking with Dr. Rebecca Redfern. More carbon than poo for the toothpaste surely?
Perfect jaw and teeth back then
The roads were better aswell 😂
ha, some call it covering up a murder, others call it a clandestine burial
By law people had to be buried outside the city walls. So it was more likely that families didn't want to have a loved one so far away or couldn't afford a proper burial. Although undoubtedly some were foul play! The Romans were a rough lot.
Much worse today we have Sugar in everything with cancer passing Heart attacks as cause of death today
could hear nothing but that guy breathing into the mic for 15 minutes
My father in law was Welsh and he got Paget's
I wonder if most people follow her deliberate use of English ? She is using words like "prone" in their rigorous definitions, and she is doing so to highlight important facts their research has uncovered.
Prone meaning face down, this is unusual in human burials, in most cultures at the time. people were buried laying on their side. Laying face down in your grave seemed to have some significance because of its rarity but quite WHAT it signified remains a matter of speculation. So she notes it as an important fact of that burial.
And her interview is full of these distinctions, there is a lot more information she is sharing than most people without training will grasp.
This Russian invasion of Ukraine sheds some light on some prone burials, I think. The news reports following body recovery teams (Whether exhumation of ad-hoc burials, atrocity victims in the woods or bodies found in rubble.) What happens now in the extreme circumstances of war would happen in the past to strangers and beggars. When a body is in rigor, it’s often not lying in any neat position; they get rolled into a blanket (or bodybag, or shroud) and then transported, lifted on and off vehicles etc, and handled by different sets of people on the way to their eventual burial. The same goes for people found after decay has begun. By the end of the line, no-one knows or is going to look inside the blanket or bodybag to find out which way up the body is. And rather than lift the body to put it in the grave - which is very difficult in the best if circumstances - they TIP it in. I can imagine this happening in a town context to people discovered murdered in a field, say, or to drowning victims washed up or pulled out of the river after skin slippage, fish nibbling and battered by boats and shore. If you’ve reached the fragrant stage, then once you’re wrapped up, it really isn’t easy to tell what way up you are. And if you are a dead pauper, criminal or stranger carted to the graveyard for the sake of public hygiene, or in a situation like war or plague when the gravediggers are overwhelmed - there may be no-one who cares what way up you are.
@@eh1702 That is a very interesting speculation. It seems very likely, just from the purely human empathy point of view.
I wonder how you could go about *scientifically* determining if that was the case in an archaic burial ?.
@@uncletiggermclaren7592 I don’t see that it could be *determined*, but you could perhaps find a balance of probabilities if you examined all prone skeletons and found some statistical trend. I don’t know if it is physically possible, but perhaps from the bones of fingers, toes, eye sockets etc, it could be possible to decide whether decay began in an oxygen rich environment - in the open air - or in water (say with tiny water organisms) or in the soil. If you were able to find a big enough number of stored bones from prone burials that have been well documented, and compare them with normal burials from the same general time & locality, you might be able to see an area where the two sets don’t overlap.
Has the DNA from these ancient graves ever been placed on 23 and me or other genetic sites to match modern DNA
modern London DNA would not match as it would be African and Asian not European/British.
@@dotdashdotdash sure most would be, but the DNA from this person would surely be found in some modern places.
@@dotdashdotdash Nice back handed racism there bud
@@MandoHalrissian Bloody no good immigrants - I mean what did the Romans ever do for us? Don't even get me started on the Saxons, Vikings and Normans. There we were one day running around naked with blue paint all over us and then these good for nothing foreigners came and built roads and cities. Bastards.
@@MandoHalrissian you mean facts?
So north west South Africa where the Berbers are? What is your obsession with Britain being multi cultural since it’s inception is quite astounding. Stop trying to rewrite history it’s getting quite boring. Tell us all about the inventions from sub Saharan Africa if you want to inform us of their rich history good luck.
Making sure they ain't coming back to haunt? Removal of a head postmortem and post decay. Buried in chains. Odd
interesting analysis of how people were buried in Roman London with Dr Rebecca Redfern and ,Dr Simon Elliott. Shackles might indicate either prisoner or slave.
Very Interesting and informative
Roman London appears to have been a fascinating place.
Fascinating documentary, fascinating woman. She can come again. 'Powdered dog poo.' Nice one.
The sound engineer needs to have filtered out the should of the male presenter's audit mouth breathing room when the woman has answering his questions.
It's creepy
We can see that they are of African descent..
Well thank god for them, otherwise they would have to be of her descent :))))
Tooth paste made with dog poo? It is probably safer then fluride. HA HA HA.
Sorry I find the host to be insufferably annoying and also not visually appealing like the doctor.
Great information, but the male host's breathing sounds like a stalker from a 70's horror movie.
This woman sounds like she's chewing gum and talking at the same time....hard. to understand her dialect
His heavy breathing is driving my misophonia crazeeeeee. Not a good idea with earphones on lol.
You said it's a female, yet you refer to her as "they." ugh.
You can not hide this lady,s beauty with glasses .
That vision of the edge of the Thames would be more than 100m back from the present day water edge under buildings by now
Please stop waving you're arms about' it looks totally stupid.
Another wonderful presentation,thank you.
In cases where the vertebrae are fused you can end up like Richard III (different condition in his case) but you only have pain during the inflammatory phase. You will never look like an Olympic gymnast but you can be functional.
How can they tell they're African in descent and which ones were men or women just by looking at their bones? We don't know what they identified as. 😉
Certain elements are present in specific amounts in food and water and are often left as traces in the DNA remains.
Incredible the amount of informationthat can be found from a few bones.
Not Paget’s disease in what she describes as a melted spine area ( the fused 12:35 bone case. ) I’d guess more like Ankylosing Spondylosis.